The end is finally here. We have reached the end of the semester, and with it, the end of my documented journey in puff pastry. While I can say that the experience was one filled with delicious pastries and fun times, I can’t lie and say that I haven’t been feeling the looming dread of posting each new blog post. With this being the final post, I can foresee that a sense of relief might wash over me in the near future. With that being said, I’d like to look over the past few months as a whole and identify the things that I liked, the things that I didn’t like, things that worked, things that didn’t work, and so on and so forth.
First are the things that I liked. I really enjoyed the making of the pastry dough. The dough has a nice texture and body, so it feels nice to work with. As well, I really liked eating the pastries. I made some really good stuff, so eating it was always something that I looked forward to. Freshly baked pastries are probably the best smelling things in the world, which was another plus. The things that I hated were generally limited to the work aspect of the project. I hated having to write about each of my baking adventures and misadventures. Having to write about each one, took the magic out of something that I really enjoy doing. Instead of it being a fun thing, it turned into a chore. Additionally, the PLN page was a bit troubling for me. I find it kind of embarrassing to email people that I don’t know all that well, so doing so forced me to step a little bit outside of my comfort zone.
The project went pretty well overall, but there were some problems that I had with my execution of the project. Actually, there was really one glaring problem. The problem was completely out of my control, but I feel it my duty to the readers to relay it nonetheless. As mentioned in previous blog posts, my house is in the middle of a renovation, and has been for the duration of the project. Because of that, I’ve lived for extended periods of time in three different houses. And with each new house that I was inhabiting, I was forced to use a completely different oven. Every oven has a different 350 degrees. Every oven has its own quirks. Every oven operates differently. At most of these places I didn’t have enough time to completely grasp the different qualities in each oven, having only baked one time in some of them. This allowed for bakes that were unde-rbaked, over-baked, or otherwise baked incorrectly. With this problem, I wasn’t able to draw the full potential of the pastry that I put my heart into. Outside of that, some changes to requirements messed up my scheduling a bit, and I reduced the amount of times that French pastry was made to one.
Overall, I would call this a partial success. I’ve pretty much mastered how to make rough-puff pastry, but I only had one chance to make the French version, which didn’t go completely to plan. So with that said, I don’t think I can say that I’ve fully mastered it. On the other hand, I found that the rough puff pastry, in relation to the amount of effort that it takes, is just as good if not better than the French stuff. So have I completed my goal? No, but I have gained a lot of knowledge and experience on a subject that I both care about deeply, and am very interested in. Originally, I thought that puff pastry was going to be a way to elevate my skill in this passion of mine, because I believed it to be really hard. And while I did elevate my skill, I found it to be a lot easier than I anticipated. So if I learned one lesson from this experience, it would be that you should always try new, difficult things, because you might find them to be easy.
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